


the guard place

by thirtysixhudson



Category: The Good Place (TV), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:29:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25572124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thirtysixhudson/pseuds/thirtysixhudson
Summary: When Jason is twenty-two, he crashes a jet ski into a manatee while visiting Pillboi’s cousin’s nephew in Fort Myers. He hits his head on the handlebars and wakes up in an emergency room, the attending staring at him quizzically. He will never know it, but this is his first death. It is not the last.
Comments: 30
Kudos: 162





	the guard place

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this tumblr post:

When Jason is twenty-two, he crashes a jet ski into a manatee while visiting Pillboi’s cousin’s nephew in Fort Myers. He hits his head on the handlebars and wakes up in an emergency room, the attending staring at him quizzically. He will never know it, but this is his first death. It is not the last. 

(The manatee is fine).

In the next year, Jason dies six times. A brief highlight of his deaths includes:

  * Food poisoning after eating 32 undercooked Jumpin’ Jalapeno Wacky Wings at Stupid Nick’s Wing Dump
  * Choking on a glow stick at a Skrillex concert
  * Tripping over a toddler and drowning in a kiddie pool full of jellyfish at OceanGlobe, his cousin’s knockoff SeaWorld park



He dreams about a woman trapped under the sea, two sleeping men wrapped around each other, a woman older than the Parthenon, a man drinking surreptitiously from a flask.

He also dreams about flying shrimp, a sinkhole opening up under a restaurant, and that the Jaguars win the superbowl, so the other dreams don’t make much of an impression.

He doesn’t realize what’s happening until The Safe, when he dies over and over again, the world graying out in a way that he can’t ignore or explain away. He is dead, and then he is not, and when the cops open up the door to the safe and lead him to a car with flashing lights he gasps for air like a fish. 

When the team breaks him out of jail, Jason thinks that they’re a rival dance crew trying to recruit him. He keeps thinking this as they sit down to dinner in a shack somewhere in central Georgia, hours away from Jacksonville and Dance Dance Resolution: We Resolve to Dance and everyone he knows.

“No,” Andy says, not unkindly. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? You can’t die. Neither can we.” 

Jason isn’t really sure why this would prevent them from forming the best dance crew ever seen between Atlanta and Jacksonville - if anything, it should give them the edge the next time they need to fight an alligator in the Publix parking lot where they have dance battles at two in the morning - but he keeps this to himself. 

“How did you find me?” Jason asks. Until the jailbreak, he’d never seen these people before in his life. Even Donkey Doug hadn’t come to visit him when in prison; Pillboi would’ve, Jason knew, but it wasn’t like he could make any calls from his cell.

“We dream of each other until we meet,” Joe says.

“Because we’re meant to find each other. Like destiny. It used to take years to track a new one, but Booker found those videos of you on the internet,” says Nicky.

“Oh dip! Yeah, Pillboi films all my dance moves and puts them on TikTock and then puts the TikToks on Instagram and then puts the Instagrams on YouTube. We’re gonna go viral.” 

The team exchanges a glance. 

“I didn’t understand any of those words,” says Joe.

Jason goes on one mission with the team. He forgets all of Andy’s training the moment he hears gunfire and lights a Molotov cocktail.

**Author's Note:**

> Not included in this fic, but absolutely playing on the theater screen of my mind every single moment of the day: Booker and Jason playing Super Mario Party in Jason's budhole.
> 
> Thx to The Slack Channel for encouragement & positive reinforcement.


End file.
